Whinge while you work

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08 August 2006

It’s amazing how much women seem to complain in the workplace. On and on they moan and grumble; “I’ve got so much to do”; “Look at all this I’ve got, it’s not fair”;”I’m so bogged down with stuff, you won’t believe it”;”I really struggled getting out of bed this morning, I can barely face coming in.”

Admittedly there is not much complaining coming from younger women, aged 18 to 26. However, when a woman has been in the workforce for a few years, the complaining really starts, and by about 30 it’s in full gear. Obviously there are still some exceptions, and I have known a couple of older women who are really enthusiastic about their jobs, but rarely do I encounter a woman past about 27 who doesn’t seem to complain either quite regularly or, if not, incessently about their workload, how much they’ve got to do, how much they hate their jobs, and so on, sometimes backed up with the lament that they wish a “nice rich man” to come and save them.

Naturally, this is all to do with how a significant number of women seem to think that they’ll be working full-time for more than ten-years, ideally less. A survey of newly qualified female doctors, for example, found that three-quarters expected to be working either part-time or not at all (either on a career-break or completely retired) by 35. It’s probably even higher for women who drift into Pink Collar jobs with little enthusiasm to begin with.

Someone once came up with a good analogy as to why young women often seemed more enthusiastic than young men in the workplace.

If you imagine a load of men and women on the starting line of an 400-metre running circuit. The men are told they have to do ten-laps, women are told they only have to do two-laps. Naturally the women will start off fast, jogging rapidly or maybe even sprinting. The men will start out slower, probably cheesed off at the idea of having to do five-times the running as women.

However, imagine if, just as they are approaching the end of the second lap, the women are told that, in actual fact, they have to do ten-laps after all. Naturally they’ll be pissed off. They’ll grumble and mutter and whine as they plod on, lap after lap. The men will be doing the same as the women but will not complain; they knew that they had ten-laps ahead of them all along.

This is similar to women in the workplace. Many women expect that, by 30 or 35, they’ll be married and able to work part-time or not at all. At the very least they’ll assume that’s an option even if they intend on working throughout their lives. I’ve seen plenty of women in their early to mid-twenties all enthusiastic about work and not bothered about being a boring housewife quickly change their minds when they’ve been working for a few years. That’s when the complaining starts. Us men are often just as busy, but we invariably figured that we will still be working in our thirties and beyond; it doesn’t occur to us we’ll be married to a woman who will work to support us. Us men are not surprised to find ourselves stuck in an office or factory a decade into the workforce. Women, frequently, are, and their complaining reflects this shock and annoyance, and often betrays their childish belief that the world owes them a husband and a chance to be a Lady of Leisure (not a Housewife though; that would indicate housework.)

The Marriage Strike is increasing the number of women finding their anticipated opt-out-of-work clause is not there and they’ll have to work away through into middle-age and beyond. They’ll have to finish the ten-laps with us men.

There’s no point in pointing out that they fell for feminism which encouraged them to come into the workplace, few women will respond with anything other than more whining. Just let them complain. After a while it becomes background noise and easy to ignore.

posted by Duncan Idaho @ 7:03 AM
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At 7:50 AM, Phoenix said…

Duncan, I can’t agree with this at all. Maybe the work environments are different out in the UK, but here in the US in my experiences it’s the younger women that whine and complain the MOST! And they definitely enjoy creating office tension and drama. They can’t stop talking about how they have the “most” work to do, and they won’t ever stop talking about how everyone around them is stupid or doesn’t do any work. It’s always pretty hypocritical lying too, these women spend most of their days gossiping or wasting time, or simply do things much slower and inefficiently. After all, that’s what happens when you’re busy trying to criticize everyone around you all the time rather than concentrate on your own work. These same women will also be the first to complain if men gather around and talk about sports or anything for even 10 minutes, where they’ll gossip about celebrities or fashion for hours. These women will also conveniently take shopping breaks during the work day, and then act like a cardinal sin has been committed if a man returns 10 minutes late from lunch or has to leave early for something. Again, it’s women constantly applying different standards to everyone else except themselves, that is, they don’t hold themselves to any standards but will hold men to them. This is why i absolutely abhor working with women, and make it my life goal to try to work as little as possible. I just don’t need the aggravation, and I certainly have no intention of supporting a woman. Unfortunately, it’s near impossible these days to get a decent job like that. All the really cushy jobs have gone to females, yet, most of us are still forced to deal with them. Thanks to affirmative action, no matter where you go, there will be an annoying woman that probably didn’t deserve her job there to make your work life miserable. They can try to shame us as much as they want, but if we don’t make the money we simply don’t make the money. Either they’re going to have to start supporting us, or they can die as lonely spinsters surrounded by their family of cats.

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At 9:31 AM, Manswuk said…

I don’t entirely buy the idea that ‘feminism pushed women into the workplace’. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, most people were basically peasants and (despite men doing most of the heavy lifting) both genders worked hard on the farm. The 1950s, with their high birth & survival rates and stay-at-home housewives, were more of an aberration than anything else. Furthermore, with sky-high property prices in the UK, it is very difficult to save a deposit and pay a mortgage on just one salary. The idea that men’s salaries would increase drastically if women abandoned the workplace is ludicrous; the more likely result would be a new wave of East European immigration followed by lots of whingeing in Polish. And by the way, women complain all the time about everything to everybody. And the older they get, the more they complain. If they do leave the workforce, the whingeing is merely transferred to their husbands & friends / relatives. That is why a cheerful wife is considered a treasure in all societies.
Manswuk

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At 1:02 PM, darkbhudda said…

The worst part of their whining is, as with all their whining, it is contradictory.

They complain the company doesn’t value them or believe they are capable and they should be given more responsibility and more challenging work.

Then they get the responsibility and they complain the work is too challenging. Yet at the same time they still complain they are not valued.

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At 1:12 PM, The Fatalist said…

And have you ever noticed as soon as you make a joke about cooking, or doing the washing up, they have a moan at you. But as soon as there’s a heavy box that needs lifting who is the first person they ask to help them…
Equality…my arse! 😉

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At 1:40 PM, Bernie said…

The feminist/sexual revolution and the betrayal of the family by the legal system are the two chief causes of this destruction and (a generation later) of the skyrocketing of crime, second- generation illegitimacy and other social pathology. Other causes are the social acceptance of non-family groupings as “families”; the abandonment of the idea of marriage as a legal contract; the abolishing of the distinction between “good” and “bad” women; the consequent abolishing of the distinction between responsible and recreational sex; the acceptance of Screwtape’s view that marriage is less important than a storm of emotion called “being in love” ; the creation of reverse-rites-of-passage to prevent the transition to adulthood (e.g., trial marriage, Esalen-type group therapy in which participants break down and have a happy cry when they learn that self-discipline is not required of them); the alliance of sexual anarchists in academe and the media with feminists and other anti-patriarchal, anti-social groups; the sentimental chivalry of lawmakers; the feminist-legal attempt to make divorce into a viable alternative to marriage (for women); improved computerized techniques for extorting child support money from ex-husbands, techniques which make divorce attractive to women and marriage unattractive to men; the lowered status given to maternal functions and the higher status given to career-elitism for women; the increasing education (albeit diluted education) of women; their growing economic independence; the growth of the Backup System (welfare, day care programs, etc.); sex mis-education of children, including pre-adolescent children, who are robbed of their latency stage and pressured into premature preoccupation with sexuality; the censorship of facts and ideas unpalatable to feminists–and the placing of feminists in positions in bureaucracies and the media where they can exercise this censorship; the qualitative erosion of education since the 1960s, including the creation of Mickey Mouse programs such as Women’s Studies; the abolition of shame, guilt and field direction (doing what everyone else does) as social controls (illustrated, e.g., by actresses flaunting their illegitimate children as status symbols); the inversion of “cultural flow” (in dress, hair style, music, ideas, language), formerly from the higher ranks of society to the lower, now from the lower to the higher….And so forth. Small wonder feminists and sexual anarchists celebrate the demise of the family and the restoration of matriliny and promiscuity.

You are spot on with this post Eternal Bachelor. Another reason why the incessant female whinging occurs is that they get away with it. If you’re a man and you whinge about how much you have to do, colleagues or your boss will rebuke you. The comment you’ll get will be along the lines of “If you can’t do your job we’ll replace you with someone who can.” Women never get this and people just put up with their whining without comment.

My business used to take me into many different working environments and I can tell you that without exception it was always women whinging and whining, backstabbing, complaining or gossiping endlessly about irrelevant trivia. Men just get on with it and seldom complain. It always amazed me that women had three hours to spend complaining how busy they are. Women get away with murder in the workplace because there is a “Kid-glove” culture because of idiotic sexual-discrimination laws that enable them to claim harassment even when they are treated preferentially. You can’t even tell them off these days without the fear of made-up allegations of discrimination later on. This gives them carte blanche to behave appallingly in the workplace.

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At 5:17 PM, Duncan Idaho said…

Undoubtedly young women do complain a lot as well – about boyfriends, the weather, their hair, money – but in my experience they seem less miserable about their workloads. Maybe it’s just because I’ve spent a lot of time around young women doing training contracts or, at the moment, by student girls working through their summer holidays. They’re all enthusiastic, at least about work, as they’re doing training, still students or only just into the workforce. It’s when they’ve been working a few years that the moaning and whinging starts as they realise it’s not as much fun as they’d imagined and that there are few men willing to support them.

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At 8:53 PM, Playboy said…

TIP FOR GUYS: Do not work in any field/career where women are highly represented. The work environment is poor, the pay is worse, and if you get a female supervisor she will be petty and abusive.

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At 1:35 AM, Phoenix said…

playboy: but what field are women not highly represented in these days? With affirmative action, they’re everywhere. Even for traditionally male jobs, like the military or construction work, you will often be dealing with females who are either given or take a sort of supervisory role, just so they can boss more men around.

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At 1:46 PM, NYMOM said…

I agree with Duncan Idaho on this…

It quite a different situation today for women to work a job away from home for 8 to 10 hours a day…Since women working on a farm, where she had her children with her while she worked at tasks that she set her own pace and timetable to, is no comparison to what goes on today…

AND yes many women don’t expect to work outside as a career. I was not expecting too. I was raised in the 50/60s to believe I would marry and make my home, husband, and family my career. That my job would basically be a short-term one until my life-long career began…

Imagine my surprise when the feminist revolution began just as I entered young adulthood 17/18 years old. I eventually married and had children but I was 31 before that happened…and never fully prepared for a career as I should have been.

I just winded up getting my degree very late in life (about 5 years ago never realizing I needed one) so it did impact me very negatively to not be prepared for a life-long career outside of the home.

That’s why “Take Your Daughter to Work Day” was so important; but then men got jealous of it and turned it into a career day for both sexes…but little girls need to be told and informed that they HAVE to have a career, as they will be working for most of their lives.

This is not stressed enough to them and the result is as this post points out…a lot of disappointed and confused 30ish women with no real training for a life-long career, not even being aware that they need it.

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At 1:58 PM, mfsob said…

Even the dullest of people probably realize by now that the majority of employees in social service, human resources, administrative and low-level government jobs are women.

Why? Simple – because once they get in, they’re bulletproof. And the women know this! Unless they hose down the lunchroom with an Uzi, or something similar that FORCES the police to arrest them, there is virtually nothing that management can do to them because of the politically-correct, feminazi, litigious society they have helped create and encourage.

Employers are so shit-scared of sexual harassment lawsuits that they allow female employees who are actually hurting the bottom line and driving off customers to remain. Governments keep non-performing females on the payroll because they know they will be hit with sexual discrimination charges if they do anything to even attempt to get these parasites to work. Non-profits and social service agencies are so paranoid about “gender and racial equality” that they will hire – and keep – women who are either completely unqualified or totally incompetent in their jobs, just so the agencies look good on their gender and hiring reports. Don’t tell me this doesn’t happen. I have seen it with my own, eyes, and had to live with the (usually) ghastly consequences, over and over again, no matter which business I was in.

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At 2:18 PM, Anonymous said…

I’ve had the misfortune of working with both older and younger women. And, from my personal experience, they both seem to whine the same amount, although the subject of their whining differs with their age.

One item of note from my most recent experience:

I am a 43 year-old graduate student working towards a PhD. One of the female graduate students, of the normal graduate student age, had been given a teaching fellowship appointment last year, with the appropriate funding and increased teaching load. While the graduate student in question had been quick to point out that her stipend had increased because of the teaching fellowship, she quickly started whining about the fact that she had an increased teaching load.

Now, this is a no-brainer for me. Teaching fellowship appointment and more money means that you are going to be *doing* *more* *teaching*!!!!!

Her complaints got to the point that the graduate advisor of the department had a meeting to ask other graduate students if they had any complaints with teaching load. I pointed out, quite bluntly, that if someone is getting more money, then they should expect to have to do more work for the money.

That pretty well seemed to shut down the whole discussion.

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At 5:04 PM, joe said…

It’s certainly not true of all women. I work as an investment banker and have to work with some high power women. They work some 20 hour days and love it.

But of course there are always exceptions.

——————————————————————————– At 12:52 AM, Anonymous said…

but then men got jealous of it

You have the mind of an emotionally immature child.

(As you are fond of saying) Typical.

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At 4:53 PM, Anonymous said…

I once did some consultancy work for a Barclays Bank call centre in Liverpool, UK.

95% of the workers were female. Nearly every worker had a vanity mirror with the message ‘You’re feeling good today’. The whole place clucked like a hen house

Strange how the female workers interacting with us (mainly guys) consultants were all wearing excessive makeup and short skirts, compared to the other female workers.